Mounting attacks on civilians keep those left in terror

Published 10:00 pm, Friday, May 19, 2006

In the once-prosperous, predominantly Sunni neighborhood of Amariya, in the northwest part of the capital city, shop owners have shuttered and abandoned their stores.

In Ghazaliya, one neighborhood over, residents have erected barricades made from mangled carcasses of burned-out cars, chopped-up palm trunks, garbage cans and concertina wire in hopes of preventing would-be murderers from driving into their streets. As in other parts of the city, daytime slayings here are routine.

Families across Baghdad's mixed Sunni-Shiite and Sunni neighborhoods are fleeing the uncontrolled violence in droves, seeking refuge with relatives in other parts of the country or abroad.

An Iraqi journalist who lives in a mixed Sunni-Shiite district that borders Amariya said unknown assailants shot a neighbor dead Sunday and left his body outside his gate.

"I heard his little children cry over his body," she said. "I don't have any hope left."

The journalist, like every Iraqi civilian interviewed for this story, did not want her name used because she feared she would be targeted for murder.

Since the bombing Feb. 22 of the Shiite Askariya Shrine in Samarra, Baghdad has descended into a maelstrom of killing that shows little sign of abating. Most of the victims have been taken from their homes and executed, their bodies dumped in residential streets and alleys.

"I am afraid to go outside, to send my children to play in the street," said a high school Arabic teacher in Amariya, where bougainvillea vines crawl up stucco walls that surround manicured gardens. At least 3,500 Iraqis have been killed this year, according to official statistics. In April alone, according to the Health Ministry, 762 people -- primarily civilians -- were killed in Baghdad. The previous month, the Baghdad morgue received 1,294 bodies, more than double the 596 received in March 2005, according to the New York Times. Most of the victims were shot to death. As many as 100,000 people have fled their homes in Baghdad.

Last week, President Jalal Talabani said Iraqis "feel shock, dismay and anger over the daily reports of the discovery of unidentified corpses and those of others killed" around the capital.

"If we add this to the number of corpses that are not discovered, or to similar crimes in other provinces, then the total number ... reflects that we are confronting a situation no less dangerous than the results of terrorist acts," he said.

Nobody knows for sure who is killing civilians. Sunni leaders accuse the Shiite-run Interior Ministry, which controls the police, of operating death squads in a campaign of sectarian cleansing. Shiite officials angrily deny the charge. They say the killers buy police uniforms and badges -- sold for as little as $15 -- in Baghdad's markets. U.S. military officials say the killers are trying to destabilize the political process in Iraq as the Shiite-led coalition seeks to form a national unity government.

Last month, residents in Amariya discovered the bodies of 16 Sunni men, all shot in the head, in a garbage-strewn street, the individual corpses spread 40 feet apart.

"I knew their names. It's very frightening," said the teacher.

"There was brain matter -- it looked like they had brought some already dead and executed others on the road," said Sgt. Wayne Trimble, 28, with the 1-87, who saw the bodies. "They brought them over in a cattle truck."

But U.S. soldiers who patrol this part of northwest Baghdad appear able to do little to stem the violence. On Wednesday, while a Chronicle reporter and photographer accompanied the 1-87 on patrol in Ghazaliya, two short bursts from AK-47 assault rifles rang out from a reed-choked wasteland as the soldiers questioned a suspected insurgent in a house nearby. Iraqis whose homes overlook the wasteland said they saw two men kill a third, load his body into the trunk of a car and drive off. No one seemed to know the identity of the victim or his killers.

"We'll know when the body turns up. They usually dump them in some street the next day," said 1st Sgt. Michael Contreras, 36.

Daily attacks against American and Iraqi troops in Baghdad are also on the rise. On Wednesday, three roadside bombs and a drive-by shooting targeted Iraqi forces in Baghdad, killing one police officer and wounding eight others.

On the same day, another roadside bomb blew up next to a 1-87 convoy on a stretch of road American soldiers have christened "the G-spot." (On satellite pictures of Baghdad, the road looks like an upside-down "G.")

The bomb detonated five feet from the unit's humvees as they maneuvered the potholed road. The blast spewed shards of shrapnel and chunks of asphalt into the air. Pieces of metal, rock and dust rained through the turrets.

A dozen yards away, an Iraqi man in a white sedan stared at the billowing black smoke, his hands frozen on the wheel. A woman peeked out from the metal gate of her compound, her face contorted with fear. Then she shut the gate with a loud bang, hoping to seal off her house from the violence outside, at least for a while.

Despairing that neither U.S. nor Iraqi troops can defend them, increasing numbers of residents are setting up their own militias and checkpoints, adding to the number of guns and gunmen spreading throughout the city.

Others simply huddle inside their walled compounds.

"The majority of the time, we just sit inside our houses," said a man from inside his gate on an Amariya street. "We don't really go outside."